The Spartacus War

by Strauss, Barry

  From Vesuvius to Nuceria, the rebels had gone from strength to strength. Yet, like the Romans, they too faced an autumn of discontent. In fact, the rebels staggered with success. Spartacus’s men now had unrealistic expectations; the attempt to talk sense into them nearly broke the army in two. They were, says a Roman source, no longer willing to obey him.

  What had happened is this: Crixus was in favour of attacking Varinius, while Spartacus wanted to avoid battle. A tactical difference, but a deeper, strategic disagreement divided them. Crixus wanted to widen the war in Italy. He wanted more loot, more revenge and, no doubt, more power. Spartacus did not think that the rebels were winning. In fact, in his opinion, the men were now in mortal danger. Their movements were aimless and ad hoc. Sooner or later the Romans would cut them off and wipe them out. To be safe, they needed to leave as quickly as possible.

  And go where? Crixus might have asked. Spartacus wanted to take the army north to the Alps, where they would split up and head back to their respective homelands, be they in Thrace or the Celtic lands. Parts of Thrace and most of Gaul were still free. Gladiators, runaway slaves and free Italians could all live there beyond the long arm of Rome.

  It was an inspiring plan, and one that a follower of Dionysus might have relished: the Greeks, at any rate, believed that the god had travelled through the high and rugged Hindu Kush Mountains (located between today’s Afghanistan and Pakistan). Some even said Dionysus had been born there. Surely, the god would lead his follower Spartacus over the Alps.

  It was, others no doubt replied, an impossible dream. But what was the alternative? The Alps were not easy to cross but they were not impassable. Hannibal had proved that. The Roman legions, however, were another matter. Spartacus knew the Roman army well, and he doubted the rebels’ ability to defeat the Romans in a regular battle. If the rebels could not defeat a second-rate force like Varinius’s, what would happen when the armies in Spain and the East came home, and the rebels had to fight veteran legions?

  Spartacus understood the difference between guerrilla and conventional warfare. Guerrillas cannot defeat a conventional army by military means; they can only frustrate it. As long as the conventional army retains its will to fight, it will win in the end. And it was impossible to imagine the Romans losing their will in Italy. Eventually, the Romans would wipe out the rebels.

  Spartacus was right but he was outvoted. He had only a small number of supporters, ‘a few farseeing people, men of liberal minds and nobility,’ as one Roman writer puts it. Crixus had behind him the majority of his fellow Celts as well as the majority of the Germans. Many of the Celts and Germans had been born in Italy, being the children of prisoners of war from 102 and 101 BC. ‘Going home’ might not have meant as much to them as it did to Spartacus. ‘Home’ was Italy.

  But a Roman writer gives Crixus’s supporters lesser motives: ‘Some of them stupidly put their trust in the masses of new recruits flooding in and in their own fierce spirit, others were disgracefully heedless of their fatherland, and most of them had a naturally slavish temperament that longed for nothing except booty and bloodshed.’ These comments are bigoted but they are not entirely inaccurate. From Thrace to Gaul, barbarian warfare put a premium on the acquisition of loot. It brought only limited wealth, since much of the booty was consecrated to the gods, but cattle, gold and women were the coin of the realm, and Italy teemed with all three.

  And military logic favoured some of Crixus’s points. After all, a reasonable person might have argued that if the rebels turned north now, they would have Varinius on their tail, and eventually he would force a battle. A reasonable person might also have pointed out the difficulty of crossing the Alps in autumn. The rebels would have to sit in northern Italy and fight off the Romans until the following spring before they could go over the mountains again. Northern Italy was neither as rich nor as warm as the south. Why not build a base under the southern sun? After all, the Roman armies in Spain and Asia Minor were not likely to come back to Italy soon.

  From the operational point of view, Spartacus was probably wrong. It was safer to defeat Varinius before heading north. But strategically, Spartacus was right. The rebels had to leave Italy, if not today or the next day then soon. And eventually they had to cross the Alps. Spartacus was unable to win his case, but he did a signal service to his people even so: he held the army together.

  Spartacus and his supporters might have quit. They might have worked their way quietly northwards avoiding Roman roads, and headed for the Alps. Or they might have used their loot to buy or bribe their way onto a boat heading east. But Spartacus was an armed prophet and did not want to be a general without an army. Dionysus’s chosen one was not about to slink off.

  The quarrel was settled by a compromise. As Crixus wanted, the fugitives would continue plundering and they would fight Varinius. But as Spartacus wanted, they would not fight him yet. Instead, they would prepare carefully for the coming battle. It was inevitable, Spartacus said, that Varinius would rebuild his army. In preparation, the rebels needed to increase the number and quality of their troops. They needed elite recruits; the closest thing to that, Spartacus suggested, was to find shepherds. In order to find them, the rebel army would have to head out into more open country, somewhere more suited to grazing. In other words, they would have to go south into Italy’s pasturelands.

  Spartacus knew what he was doing. Roman herdsmen were slaves, tough, hardy and independent. They were fighters, as they had to be in order to survive in the wild, where wolves and bandits were routine and bears were not unknown. Slave shepherds had made up the core of the great Sicilian Slave Revolts. Herders had sustained the Lusitanian (Portuguese) rebel Viriathus in his eight years of guerrilla war against the Roman conquerors (147-139 BC). The current Roman rebel in Spain, Sertorius, drew many of his supporters from shepherds as well.

  Spartacus knew one other thing too: the margin of error. The Romans could afford bad generals and defeated armies. In fact, Roman history was littered with failure, from the Allia to the Caudine Forks to Cannae. The Romans could lose many battles as long as they won the last battle. And Rome’s ironclad political system and profound population resources gave it the will and the manpower to go the distance.

  The rebels had no room for mistakes. Spartacus knew that his men were good but also that they had been lucky. Roman incompetence allowed them the luxury of going on raids instead of drilling soldiers, of arguing with each other instead of fighting the enemy.

  Rome could throw away praetors. The rebels needed a leader.

  4

  The Pathfinders

  In autumn 73 BC when Spartacus and Crixus struck their deal, the army turned south. Aiming to avoid Varinius, they doubtless avoided the Roman road, which could be easily guarded. Instead, they probably headed for the hills. They likely travelled on byroads along mountain ridges, on the timeless paths of muleteers seated with their baskets, on trails beaten through the woods by herds migrating to the mountains in summer and back to the plain before winter. Heavy-armed legionaries and their supply wagons could not take that route, but light-armed rebels could.

  However, the rebels could not find their way on their own. They needed pathfinders, whether willing or coerced. Without local intelligence to point the way and to indicate food supplies, the fugitives would have been lost. Grizzled farmers, shaggy mountain men, young girls on the way to draw water from a spring, slaves barely free from their chains, fat landowners too slow to run from the rebels: these would have been Spartacus’s eyes and ears in the Italian countryside.

  The first example in our sources of one of Spartacus’s guides is a prisoner. He came from the region known as the Agri Picentini, the fertile plains south of the city of Salernum (modern Salerno). But he could hardly have been the first local guide for the rebels, because they had already travelled over rough country. After leaving the vicinity of Nuceria, they had headed inland and passed by Abella (modern Avella), a small city about 5 miles north-east of Nola. Abel
la sits at the foot of the thickly wooded Partenio Mountains (modern name), in the upper valley of the Clanis (Clanio) River. It lies in green, well-watered farm country, famous for its hazelnuts and its high winds. Rainy and snowy in the winter, Abella was isolated and rural, its cool, fresh air worlds away from the urban heat of Capua. But Abella had seen its share of history. An Italian city, it forged close ties with Rome. Roman roads, Roman land surveying, and Late Republican rustic villas have all been found in Abella’s farmlands. Abella stayed loyal to Rome during the Social War (91-88 BC) and, as a reward, was probably honoured with the status of ‘colony’ by Sulla. Now, as the sources say, Spartacus’s men ‘happened upon the farmers of Abella who were watching over their fields’. (The word for ‘farm ers’ can also mean ‘colonists’.) Their meeting with the rebels was probably not a happy one for them.

  Spartacus and his men now made for the southern Picentini Mountains, about 30 miles away as the crow flies. Assuming they went through the back country, they would have crossed the hills of Irpinia and climbed into the Picentini Mountains, always heading south and east. They would have made their way through forests of oak and chestnut, past nearly 6,000-foot-high mountains, through gorges and over torrents. It was neither an easy route nor a rich one; the fertile plains below around the Via Annia were visible here and there in the distance, but they were in the Romans’ hands. No one could have eaten much on this march.

  After leaving the Picentini Mountains, the rebels’ next goal was the Silarus (modern Sele) River, about 20 miles south-east of the city of Salerno (the Roman Salernum). In ancient times, the Silarus marked the regional boundary. Once they crossed it, Spartacus and his army would have left Campania for Lucania. About 8 miles further would bring them to a pass in the hills. As soon as they went over that, they would begin a new phase of their revolt.

  They would now be in the heart of Lucania, where they would be sailing on a vast inland sea: green waves of hills broken by upland plains, thick forests, remote towns and craggy mountain peaks. Lucania’s rugged terrain stretched southwards as far as the eye could see until the ‘heel’ of the Italian ‘boot’, where it dropped off into a fertile, coastal strip bounded by the Ionian Sea.

  Lucania was a land of woods, pastures and slaves, a guerrilla’s favourite landscape. Like Sicily, it was populated by slave shepherds and slave field hands. They were a rebel recruiter’s dream. This was Spartacus Country.

  All that lay before them, but first Spartacus, Crixus and their followers had to slip past the Romans. Surely the Romans had posted guards on the bridge where the Via Annia crosses the Silarus? Enter the Picentine guide. A Roman writer describes the situation concisely: ‘and having hastily found a suitable guide from among the Picentine prisoners, he [Spartacus] made his way hidden in the Eburian Hills to Nares Lucanae and from there at first light he reached Forum Annii.’

  This puts Spartacus’s tactics in a nutshell. He made a quick decision that gave his men the advantage of local knowledge. And the result was a nimble, gutsy and effective manoeuvre.

  The Picentine was a man who knew the hills of the southern Picentini Mountains, north of the town of Eburum (Eboli). He might have been a herdsman or, more likely, a ranch owner, since he was a prisoner and not a recruit; a herdsman would probably have joined Spartacus voluntarily. It should not have been difficult to intimidate him into cooperating, given the dangers of captivity. Both Celts and Germans had a reputation for sacrificing prisoners of war as a way of honouring the gods. Reports of gruesome practices survive, such as cutting open a corpse to inspect the entrails, ripping foetuses out of their mothers’ wombs, and drinking blood from dead people’s skulls.

  In any case, the Picentine took the rebels over the Eburine (modern Eboli) Hills perhaps as far as the valley of the Middle Silarus River, where they could have crossed via an ancient ford. Then they swung south towards the town of Nares Lucanae. The Romans had no idea where the rebels were. Spartacus had run rings around Varinius, and he owed it all to his Picentine prisoner.

  Was that unwilling rebel rewarded with a drink at Nares Lucanae? There was plenty of water there; the name of the place may mean ‘Lucanian Springs’, and springs have been found at its site in the foothills of the Alburni Mountains. The finger-like peaks of those mountains rise across the valley south-east of the Picentini Mountains. There was good pasture land between both sets of mountains and the sea, so the insurgents may have picked up some supporters from the vicinity.

  At Nares Lucanae the rebels’ route rejoined the main Roman road to Regium, the Via Annia. They travelled at night, no doubt to avoid detection. It was first light when Spartacus’s men reached the little town of Forum Annii. The distance between Nares Lucanae and Forum Annii is about 15 miles, which is a long way for even a light-armed force to cover in one night, especially if the group included women and children. But it was autumn, and the nights were getting longer; the chilly air might have hurried the fastest of them on to the prize ahead. Above all, they were determined to seize the offensive and achieve surprise. They did.

  Spartacus and his men arrived at Forum Annii ‘unbeknownst to the farmers’. Forum Annii was a farming community at the northern end of the Campus Atinas (modern Vallo di Diano). The Campus is a long, narrow, upland plain, green and fertile, watered by the Tanager (modern Tanagro) River running through it. It is closed in by hills, creating a constant play of light and shadow; in the west, the mountains roll in waves, sometimes ripples, sometimes breakers. An ancient area of settlement, the valley was very rich, with farms and villas spread over the lowlands and hills flowing with pastures. In a hill town north of the valley even today, the census lists 1,300 humans and 6,000 sheep; and some of the latter are brought down from the hills and paraded around a chapel by their shepherds in an annual festival each June.

  The population was probably made up mainly of Roman settlers and their slaves. There were native Lucanians too, but they had been forced to make room for many Romans over the centuries, as punishment for choosing the losing side - something the hard-luck Lucanians had a knack for, from Hannibal to Marius to the Italian Confederacy of the Social War. The Roman settlers included both masters of large estates, primarily ranches, and small farmers. Some Late Republican tombstones depict the managers who ran the estates for their masters: men with a signet ring on a finger of their left hand and a pen and writing tablets clenched in their fist.

  One autumn morning in 73 BC the fresh air of the valley was full of screams. Spartacus and his men had arrived. They immediately went on a rampage against his orders, raping young girls and married women. Anyone who tried to resist was killed, sometimes in the act of running away. Some of the rebels threw flaming torches onto the roofs of houses. Others followed local slaves to drag their masters or their treasures from their hiding places. ‘Nothing was too holy or too heinous for the anger of the barbarians or their servile natures,’ says one Roman writer. And no help was forthcoming from Varinius’s army; it was nowhere to be seen.

  Spartacus opposed the atrocities, either out of chivalry or a calculation that if farmers were well treated, some might favour the insurgents, and tried repeatedly to restrain his men, but it was a losing battle. Crixus’s stance is unrecorded. Later events show that he wanted to loot Italy, but he also wanted to fight Varinius, and indiscipline would weaken the army.

  And then there were the local slaves, of various national origins. Some of them had not waited to bring the rebels to their masters’ hideouts but, instead, they had pulled out their quivering overlords themselves. It was a kind of offering to the insurgents and perhaps the local slaves were just trying to curry their favour. Or perhaps they were remembering the whips, chains, canes, stones, broken bones, gouged-out eyes, kicks, tongue-lashings, executions or other punishments that Roman slaves are known to have suffered. Or maybe they were thinking of minor humiliations, like having their forehead tattooed with the master’s symbol or having to pay the master for the privilege of having sex with another slave
. Or maybe they recalled some friend or relative among the slaves who had been sold off because they were sick or aged.

  The rebels stayed at Forum Annii for that day and the following night. For the local masters, it was twenty-four hours of savagery and slaughter. For the slaves, it was liberation day. They surely poured in from the surrounding area, because Forum Annii was not a big place but, by daybreak, Spartacus and Crixus had doubled the number of fugitive slaves in their group. Some of the new recruits would have been farmers but, if Spartacus had judged his prospects correctly, most of them would have been herdsmen. By autumn, they would have come down with their herds from the mountains to graze lower pastures, so they could have learned the news from Forum Annii.

  At first light, the rebels broke camp again and made for a ‘very wide field’, which sounds like somewhere in the middle of the Campus Atinas. There they could see the farmers coming out of their houses, off to the autumn harvest. Those farmers never reached their fields. Along the way they ran into a column of refugees from Forum Annii. The farmers hurried off to safety, perhaps into the hills. The autumn harvest was left for Spartacus and his hungry army.

  They had outmanoeuvred the Roman army, terrorized the master class, filled their ranks with new recruits and their bellies with fresh produce, but the insurgents were still far from victory. On the contrary, they had opened the door to defeat. Like all military activities, foraging and pillaging require discipline. Excessive looting breeds just the opposite, a breakdown in discipline. The Romans knew that soldiers who disobey commands while foraging would disobey commands while fighting. Besides, looters were subject to sudden enemy counter-attack. Ever cautious, the Romans insisted on discipline even for the simple acts of getting food and water.